Trident Is A Cartoon Idea of Strong Defense: Labour, and Britain, Should Be United on Scrapping an Outdated Relic

[This piece was originally published with Thee Westerner in September of 2015]

Amongst the many other supposed sins newly-minted leader of the British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn has been pilloried for in the press is his long-expressed opposition to and unwillingness to use the country’s independent nuclear deterrent, usually known by its project name Trident. Emblematic of essential division between the left and right of the Labour Party, the issue of Trident and its predecessor programs has long been a litmus test of ideological principle. Even during the heights of the Cold War, much of the Labour left (though notably not Nye Bevan) opposed Britain possessing nuclear weapons on essentially moral grounds. The right, for a variety of reasons ranging from the Atlantic Alliance to commitments to trade unions involved in the construction of nuclear delivery systems, strongly supported maintaining and upgrading the deterrent. The back-and-forths as to the policy of unilateral disarmament within party manifestos was generally a good sign of which wing of the party held more sway, though Labour governments were reluctant to apply the policy in practice. The strong disarmament commitment of Labour’s 1983 “longest suicide note in history” manifesto has been consistently cited as one of the key reasons for the party’s crushing defeat in that election. The charge of Labour being “soft on defense” continued to dog the party on this basis (including in this infamous electoral poster) until it committed to Trident renewal under Tony Blair in 1994, and was of a piece with the “New Labour” project as a whole.

This perception of Trident as fundamentally an issue of left-right triangulation is not necessarily wrong when considered in the purely intra-party political context, but it betrays a certain lack of analysis about the actual ostensible purposes of nuclear weapons as a component of defence. Examined from this frame, and in the current context of world affairs, Trident begins to look less like the demonstration of reasoned prudence than its backers would have and more like an expensive holdover from a different era. Overwhelming nuclear force makes sense in a world where the major security threats one faces are from other nuclear-armed states, thus created mutually assured destruction, but this is hardly the case for modern day Britain. To the extent that the UK, and other nations, now worry about nuclear threats, they come in the form of “loose nukes”, the risk that improperly secured stockpiles could fall into the hands of a hostile non-state actor, or other non-traditional crises. Trident does absolutely nothing to deal with these sorts of threats, let alone cybersecurity or stabilizing chaotic regions of the world which allow such hostile groups to form in the first place. In the main, it seems to have simply become a 2.4 billion pound way for politicians and the public to reinforce their masculinity at election time.

The irony is that, for all the party’s division over the nuclear issue, the original independent “British bomb” and the submarine-based Polaris system, Trident’s direct precursor, were constructions of Labour governments. This betrays a certain tough pragmatism which often goes unremarked upon in the British Left’s thinking. The constructors of these policies recognized that, given the geopolitics of the Cold War, an independent system was necessary both to deter potential attacks from hostile nuclear powers and to give the UK a seat at the negotiating table. The bomb developed and retained on the reasoned grounds of the level of defence it gave Britain and it was indeed the inability of the Labour left to effectively respond to the question of what security guarantees would exist absent it that sunk their public credibility. Their answer to this issue now could be the considerably easier one that any nuclear strike in the present day is not likely to come from a state actor which could even be responses to in the way Trident envisions. The threats of the current day require different technologies and policies, with a considerably lighter touch, to address, which the savings from not renewing Trident could provide for.

This sort of brass-tacks utility approach to military resource allocation is a far cry from the current, image-based one. Setting aside the likely impacts on workers, which in any case is a strange point for people usually opposed to union-friendly industrial policy to make, committing to scrapping Trident would save critical resources, have little impact on Britain’s defense and open up a wider range of discussions on what smart military policy looks like in the 21st century. More cynically, from Labour’s perspective, it might also staunch their electoral bleeding to the SNP north of Hadrian’s Wall. This is no longer, or at least no longer simply, a moral issue, but rather a deeply practical one for the anti-nuclear side, as should be presented as such. Hugh Gaitskell, the original Labour moderate, may have grappled with the party left over the nuclear issue, but his reasoning was not based on comic book fantasia, but rather a hard assessment of the contemporary political reality. His successors would do well to remember this lesson today when objecting to Corbyn’s thoughts on the matter. Though a great many things in the man’s thinking related to foreign policy are certainly are controversial, this should not be one of them.